Where is Western leadership?

posted at 2:01 pm on September 4, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

That’s the theme of columns from both myself and the Daily Mail’s Max Hastings in the face of a surging army of Islamist terrorists proclaiming themselves a state. After the beheadings of two American journalists and a series of genocidal attacks on minorities in northern Iraq and Syria, “the world seems a frightening place,” Hastings writes today. In part, Hastings argues, that’s because the West has reduced its military capabilities as part of a fantasy of declining threats. That has encouraged others to unleash their own ambitions, and not just ISIS:

Cameron and Obama convinced themselves that, once we had escaped the Afghan and Iraqi quagmires, Britain and the U.S. need fight no more conventional wars.

They refused to heed what many wise voices warned them: events and tyrants have ways of setting the agenda for peace or war, whatever the wishes of politicians.

A critical part of the argument for having strong armed forces is to deter aggressors, making it unnecessary to fight them.

Ministers, including David Cameron, lie and lie about our residual military capability.

Britain is reduced to having a little Army, which can just about Troop The Colour; a Navy that is building two enormous carriers for which we cannot afford a credible air component; and an Air Force that can conduct strike operations only with American support.

In the long term, if we want tyrants such as Putin to take seriously not only the Western Powers, but also the whole concept of international order, we must have the military capacity to fight him, even if we do not want to use it.

Twice in this generation, we seem to have succumbed to the same “end of history” thinking that promises “peace dividends” through disarmament. Instead, history keeps moving forward and in many ways repeating itself, and the peace dividend turns out to be neither peaceful nor savings at all. The 9/11 attacks almost thirteen years ago put an end to that thinking the first time, and the two beheadings of American journalists and the threat of another conducted on a British reporter should be a wake-up call.

At least Cameron is committing to the fight rhetorically. In my column today at The Fiscal Times, I argue that US policy has become utterly incoherent, starting at the top. The American response has been so contradictory that we heard three very different messages about US goals in a single day. While Joe Biden talked about following ISIS to “the gates of Hell,” Obama talked about managing them without actually engaging much at all:

Obama has spent the last two weeks talking tough but proposing no action at all, other than the tactical strikes necessary to keep ISIS away from Irbil and the Mosul Dam. The President has repeatedly rejected the option of putting American troops on the ground to fight ISIS, even while Kerry calls for an international coalition to stop their aggression.

The White House has offered contradictory signals on whether it wants to conduct air strikes on ISIS targets in Syria as well as the tactical strikes in Iraq, which makes Biden’s statement yesterday sound even more futile and empty than it otherwise would. We will follow ISIS to the gates of hell, but not to Syria? We will confront the evil of ISIS wherever it spreads, except every place it already resides?

Just a few hours after Obama’s comments in Talinn, CNN’s Jim Sciutto asked the Defense Secretary to explain the contradictory declarations of the Commander in Chief made just a few hours earlier. “Which it is?” Sciutto asked. “Is the mission goal to contain or destroy?” Hagel ended up citing Biden in discarding the “manageable threat” goal, saying that he hadn’t heard the exchanges with the media but had only read Obama’s written remarks. “The mission is very clearly, and we’re providing the President with these options, to degrade and destroy ISIS’ capability,” Hagel emphasized. “It’s not to contain them.”

The failure demonstrated by Obama and his administration over the last several weeks and months as the ISIS threat grew and metastasized is, at its core, a leadership crisis. Forget being the leader of the free world; this President can’t even lead his own team within one coherent message and strategy. As ABC’s State Department reporter Ali Weinberg remarked yesterday, this was the message just from one single day: “We’re going to destroy ISIS. Or manage them. Or shrink their sphere of influence. Or follow them to the gates of hell.”

With that failure to generate a united and coherent approach to ISIS among his own team, how could anyone expect the President to lead the world against this new terrorist army and the threat it poses to the region and the world?

While members of the president’s Cabinet along with Democratic and Republican lawmakers consider the Islamic State a danger to the United States, the man most responsible for protecting U.S. interests has suggested that they are overreacting.

ISIS is a junior varsity squad, Obama shrugged last fall.

Social media exaggerates the horrors, he sniffed last week.

Even today, pressed for clarity of his vow to “roll them back,” Obama said, “We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities, to the point where it’s a manageable problem.”

A manageable problem? While containing ISIS may be the best realistic outcome, “Let’s Manage the Situation!” is hardly a national rallying cry.

The wildly contradictory messages coming from this administration, and from Obama himself, demonstrate a bigger problem than rhetorical incoherence. Obama is not demonstrating leadership on any level, not even among his own team. That incoherence and rudderless performance encourages our enemies and opponents, and the power vacuum it leaves will not easily be refilled by the West, and certainly not while Obama continues to abdicate his responsibilities of leadership.

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America’s GI “boots on the ground” in Iraq are so frustrated with the White House message about their mission against the Islamic State — which Vice President Biden vowed Wednesday to chase “to the gates of Hell” — that they’re wondering how they’ll accomplish the goal “when we can’t even leave the front gate of our base.”

Biden on Wednesday delivered what was probably the toughest statement to date from the administration, declaring, after another U.S. journalist was beheaded by the Islamic State, “we will follow them to the gates of Hell until they are brought to justice.”

But his tough talk was at odds with a message delivered earlier in the day by President Obama, who said that while his administration’s goal is to “destroy” ISIS — it also is to “shrink” it to a “manageable problem.”

Amid the mixed messages, a source in contact with special operators in Iraq told Fox News that “frustration and confusion reign” among Americans on the ground there.

The source relayed the complaint of an unnamed special operator: “Chase them to the Gates of Hell? How the [f---] are we going to do that when we can’t even leave the front gate of our base!?”

Can the old, pre-Obama postwar order be rebuilt? Of course, but it will require budgetary discipline, a visionary president, experienced national-security advisers, skillful diplomats, and a public that is informed and cares. In other words — not for another two years and five months.

The leadership vacuum is being filled by ISIS and others of similar stripe who have the ability and will to take the reins of power. The so-called ‘leaders’ in the Western world seem to be little more than observers, just be along for the ride. Ability and will to lead are woefully absent.

Meanwhile, Waldo has converted to Islam, changed his name to Mohammed, left the picture book, and has joined ISIS. The next picture book (if there is one) will consist of satellite or other recon photos taken over Iraq or Syria, but the book probably won’t come out until mid 2017.

1. obama bumbles and blunders
2. Hagel, yes, convert, same as Brennan, has to bail him out on CNN
3. Kindergarten at state…you know that one
4. Rosen eating their lunch
5. Biden slips
6. Marines react to Biden and tell the truth

Putin and IS are laughing their azzes off at their fortunes.

everpisso and Ned Pepper orgasm all over obama, while Goebbels does it all over the world.

Josh Earnest is an oxymoron, but the lies better than Carney.

Most schadenfreude, how really painful it is for the leftist talking heads on TV to defend anything obama.

Note to media – this made my day. YOU pretend there is NO obama presidency, because it’s too idiotic to go there. YOU brung him, twice. YOU own him, Toyota!

It was eerie. It was as if there has been no Obama presidency. If I am right in my analysis, the complete absence of panels assessing Obama’s record is an indication that the academy now regards Obama as an indefensible embarrassment. This, in turn, may well be a sign that we are in for a wave election in November. What cannot be defended is apt to be jettisoned.

“We know that if we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence…”

Is this a pitch for another Nobel Prize? The first one came for something Obama hadn’t done (and never would, as it turns out). This one would be for something he fantasizes that he’s doing… “continu(ing) to shrink” ISIL’s sphere of influence.

Does he get to “imagine” his golf score, too? Or does he have to write down what he actually shoots?

There is little doubt that, were Barack Obama a hound dog, he would spend the entire day licking himself.

Meanwhile, Waldo has converted to Islam, changed his name to Mohammed, left the picture book, and has joined ISIS. The next picture book (if there is one) will consist of satellite or other recon photos taken over Iraq or Syria, but the book probably won’t come out until mid 2017.

s1im on September 4, 2014 at 2:23 PM

Rumor is that they’re all wearing balaclavas and burqas in the picture book, which makes it doubly hard.

Each time of the eleven times this nation has declared war on any other nation, the declaration was made after the President of the United States made a formal request to congress, either in writing, or by addressing a joint session of congress in person.

This is what is called leadership from the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces and President of the United States.

IF congress were to be forced to declare war without receiving such a formal request from the Commander in Chief/President of the United States of America before the declaration, the tenure of the Commander in Chief/President of the United States of America would necessarily and effectively be over, as he would have been found to be derelict in his duty and unfit to lead.

I can tell you something that isn’t incoherent and rudderless – ISIS – they are following Islam and the Koran and Mohammad with clarity and precision. Anyone who does not understand this, understands nothing.

It doesn’t matter Obama has always been incompetent and that’s not going to change.
If the Republican leadership feels he is not being engaged enough the house can declare war against ISIS.
It seems to me Obama is not the only one playing politics here…just pointing out hypocrisy.
The constitution gives that power to congress. They should exercise it if they feel the commander in chief is not being effective.

Indeed. It has been observed, down through the ages, that men can create their own prisons, their own Hell on Earth, and in Obama, whom they exalted, the LEFT realizes the veracity of those reflections.

It’s clear Obama is in the fantasyland of HopeNChange. I think of those large cruise ships or oil tankers that wreck or founder because of some bone-headed move. The captains of these ships, as apparently incompetent as they are, have probably spend their whole adult lives learning about ships and the sea.

Compare such captains to Obama, who has no training or experience to prepare him for his role as Commander in Chief. Imagine how much worse off we are than ships with incompetent captains. We have a captain of the ship of state who acts based on some fantasy of how the world is. When he sees something he doesn’t like, he says it doesn’t comport with our values, “that’s not the kind of country we are”, that’s so “20th century”, is “on the wrong side of history”, or is somehow out of step.

Obama is delusional. He makes Captain Queeg look like the model of sanity.

/Obama tells you: the world doesn’t understand geometric precision like I do.

This CinC is not ineffective, he is the de facto enemy . So yes, let Congress declare a war on our enemies, foreign and domestic. Nothing wrong with that logic

burrata on September 4, 2014 at 2:54 PM

One may ask rhetorically if Obama were the Manchurian Candidate how much more damage could he do without drawing attention to his true identity. Maybe this is as much damage as he can do, within those limits.

Western “Leaders” are extremists or dogmatists. That is to say they are committed to ideologies without any regard for actual events, and without regard for the cost to ordinary peoples’ lives.

Whatever they see and hear is filtered through their ideological preconceptions and only the residue is delivered to their brains. They are deluded, just as people like Mao were deluded; intending to do good and make improvements but with their thoughts so far disconnected from reality that they destroy what was good and embrace what is worse. They are imbued with power but have no understanding of the human condition.

If Western societies — including the USA, but especially Europe — are to avoid massive internal conflict and consequent totalitarianism it is essential to find new leaders and, more importantly, new ways of governance so that sentimentality and ideological dogma do not prevail over wisdom.

I think he has only just started, as I’ve always said, his tactics maybe marxist but his motives are islamic. He never lost sight of his goals while everyone around him distracted us with cakes and circus.

This is what happens when elections become about Race and Identity and also a big ego. Obama is the poster child what happens you don’t promote via ability.

Oil Can on September 4, 2014 at 2:12 PM

This is also what happens when people assume that an Ivy League degree equals high intelligence.

How astonishing is it that, a mere 7 years after the terror attacks of 9/11, Americans elected as Commander-in-Chief a man who says he is “uncomfortable with the concept of victory” and who admitted that he “didn’t give much thought to what would follow” after he used our Air Force to take out Qadaffi and created a power vacuum in AQ-infested Libya.

Obama had no qualifications whatsoever to be president (and even admitted as much in 2004 when he was promising voters in Illinois that he wouldn’t quit as Senator to run for President in 2008). But the media and the so-called elites convinced voters that Obama was brilliant, and pointed to his Harvard Law degree as proof.

It’s pathetic how eager millions of voters were to believe the nonsensical hype about Obama. And now all of us are paying the price for their foolishness — and will be paying for many years to come.

This DEMOCRAT administration – we must label it for what it is: Democrat, weak, cowardly, foolish, maybe low intelligence??? Geez.

I wonder what the others in the meeting say about our leaderless, fearful, cowardly president.

THey can’t take up the military b/c they’ve counted on us for decades. While staying in Germany was wise, they should have helped foot the bill – same w/ Japan and Korea – no one wants to help us financially yet we’re supposed to cover for them?

They have been spoiled and become weak like any group that does not have to support itself.

In the long term, if we want tyrants such as Putin to take seriously not only the Western Powers, but also the whole concept of international order, we must have the military capacity to fight him, even if we do not want to use it.

In other words, “speak softly and carry a big stick”.

Ronald Reagan built up the military capacity to fight the Soviet Union, but he didn’t have to use it when the Soviets backed down. Peace through strength.

Our current Duffer-in-Chief snarkily said in 2012 that the “1980s are calling and want their foreign policy back”. Sounds like a great idea, Mr. President. When will you start?